Clear View Sanitarium

When Clear View Sanitarium was built in 1926 it didn’t have any relationship with Palmer School of Chiropractic. A few years passed, and Palmer staff member, A.B. Hender, ended up working there also, and his son, Herbert Hender, was eventually a consultant for the sanitarium. Herbert Hender had an interest in psychopathology and was a popular lecturer on the subject. He was also key in the sanitariums survival in the 1930’s.

While that was happening, the original founder of Clear View, Harvey Fennern, decided to build a western Clear View branch in California that only operated for three years due to the Depression, and poor management. That facility is still called Clear View Sanitarium, and it is used as a dementia and alzheimer’s senior facility. Some of the success of the original Clear View Sanitarium goes to its matron, Mrs. Marie Hender, and the fact that it was much cleaner, better managed, and a much more positive experience than being treated in a state facility at the time, which were little more than prisons. It also didn’t hurt that B.J. Palmer was in support of the facility, which supplied a pretty steady flow of patients.

It was in 1951 when Mrs. Hender decided to retire and B.J. Palmer bought Clear View Sanitarium for what would be considered the mental division of the B.J. Palmer Chiropractic Clinic. A Palmer faculty member, Dr. W. Heath Quigley, was appointed the director, and one of the issues they were working on was getting Clear View licensed as a hospital, and not a nursing home as it had been because there were no options for specialized hospitals. Quigley was traveling to Des Moines to make a case for licensure because it didn’t have the insurance coverage it needed being licensed as a nursing home. Unfortunately by the time things were finally moving in the right direction for licensure, B.J. Palmer passed away in 1961, and his son David. D. Palmer took over as president of the school. Taking the advice of an education consultant, he decided to close the sanitarium and all of the patients were to be transferred in three months. Clear View Sanitarium was officially closed in December of 1961.

Visit the Archives if you want to learn more about Clear View Sanitarium or any of the other chiropractic hospitals that had been in operation!